I don't know why anyone would do heavy spotting with Lightroom. Photoshop seems much better suited to that.

Well, now you do. But having said that, it is more of a workflow preference, really. I like the combination of power and ease in lightroom and, for reasons already mentioned by others, try to avoid going round trip to PS if I don't have to.Anyway, it was the history I was pointing at. Even if you don't do heavy spotting, it will be growing forever if one does not clean it.

I don't see any inconsistency. at least which the advice I have read in the past, which has been to work top to bottom within the panels, particularly the "Basic" panel to optimize tonal corrections, rather than to work the panels top to bottom. Eg, I have never seen any advice to do, eg, local corrections before general, or Camera Calibrations last, which would be the order of the panels.

I also think if often makes sense—at least to me; your mileage may vary—not to traverse the separate panels from top to bottom. For example, I almost always enable Lens Corrections first because any profiled or manual changes I may make in that panel will constrain my final composition. It never occurred to me until I read Jeff Schewe's Digital Negative book that I might be paying a considerable performance penalty for that, although fortunately he provides a simple workaround. But because Lightroom renders its sequence of corrections on-the-fly, even if you throw substantial hardware resources at it, having a feel for how it does its magic does appear to be important. I'd really like to see Eric Chan address this in a comprehensive way (hint, hint). In his copious spare time, of course.

I might add, at the risk of wandering too far off-topic, that from my perspective one of the most important attributes of the Schewe book is that it provides a conceptual framework for using the Lightroom (ACR) tools, rather than treating them as a series of disconnected controls (e.g., the standard tutorial approach of "if you want to achieve this, move this slider"). He doesn't explicitly invest a lot of words in discussing LR performance optimization, but he certainly prompted me to think more about what the software was doing. I did a fair amount of software development myself before I retired, but there are some things you can't guess unless you know what the programmers had in mind when they designed a specific product. After reading his book—I'm now going around for a second pass in an attempt to recapture the stuff that leaked out of my aging brain the first time around—I believe I'm using LR considerably more efficiently than before.

The problem with lens correction last is that the correction also corrects vignetting. This can impact on the way someone processes an image? Why make careful corrections and then see them lightened in the corners which would change some of the corrections? IMO it is best to get rid of any vignetting and then process an image.

The problem with lens correction last is that the correction also corrects vignetting. This can impact on the way someone processes an image?

I don't believe it will in newer versions. If memory serves, early on when both where new to LR, there was some effect on one over the other but I think it was fixed so that you can work in whatever order you want with the Vignette. I think crop also played a role early on in the order but no longer (you can crop then Vignette).

As far as work top down, there was a time we didn't have the selective brushes. I don't think there is any argument that adding a lot of brush work on a raw can slow LR down. I'd prefer to do spotting and the easy clone work LR can do towards the end anyway.

I tried everything from optimizing the catalog to rebuilding it from scratch and doing some fancy stuff on the database directly with SQlite commands. Nothing helped. But deleting the history did help. A lot. The catalog went from 6GB to 700MB. That is a massive reduction in size, much more than I had expected from the information I was able to find on this subject.Why did the catalog grow out of proportion? Probably because I do a lot of local adjustments and I had to deal with thousands of dust spots in my SW images. And when you are working on multirow, multi exposure panoramas, that all adds up. I print some images really big, so every spot has to go.So, if you do not need all that history, it might be a good idea to delete it once in a while.

Anne

Hi AnnePerhaps a stupid question but how do you delete the history for a selected number of pictures in LR4 in one go?Henk

Yes you can, manually with db commands. Depending on how much editing you do, how big your catalog file has grown, how fast the drive it's on is etc, it can make a big difference. It's been requested as a new feature for some time. It's not something the avg user should try doing on a production db at least.

My cat is over a GB, on a fast ssd and my system flies. I don't need to do it.

I'm a bit putt off by the title "Adobe's Performance Hints for Lightroom"

It's a case of too little too late.

For hardware intensive applications Adobe should put some effort into testing, perhaps support several reference builds, and talk specifically what hardware helps and during what part of the work flow. At a minimum. There is more.

Adobe is a big company supporting professional users. This is not too much to ask for. It's also not to much to ask when GPU support for Lightroom will happen, even if they don't commit to a specific version or date.

In other words.. a professional company TALKS to their customers and keeps them informed. They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment. The best way of doing this is to put a LOT more effort into hardware support.

There must be a limit to what a company can do to make a product more attractive. A lot of users are already complaining about bloat. Any additions mean a price rise because they won't do extra work for nothing. A lot of the suggestions for addons won't technically be possible and some of them will frankly be laughable. Support for video imo comes into that category. Strip that out and it will improve speed or make room for something else. Last but not least some wish that more features of Photoshop should be added. That isn't going to happen.

They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment.

Unquote

Creating programs for old antiquated equipment must be difficult. Every system is configured differently. If someone has an old system, poorly maintained and with drivers out of date how can they produce a program to suit all?

Hi AnnePerhaps a stupid question but how do you delete the history for a selected number of pictures in LR4 in one go?Henk

Hi Henk,

In Library module, choose Grid View. Select the pictures (so, select_all if you want to purge the whole history). Switch to Develop module. Now, under the Develop menu, you will find the option "clear history".That's it. Remember that clearing the history does not delete the parametric memory. What I mean to say is that for instance, if you made local corrections, you can go back to them, change values or change your brushed area, etc. All of your changes and the ability to change them again are still there.

They want us to enjoy their software and not be angry when its working too slow on our old equipment.

Unquote

Creating programs for old antiquated equipment must be difficult. Every system is configured differently. If someone has an old system, poorly maintained and with drivers out of date how can they produce a program to suit all?

They cannot. This is the point. Well, unless it's a low overhead piece.

This is why they should do all they can to help the user understand what's needed for a certain level of performance, and as much as practical how the software will perform on a persons older machine. Of course they'd be discouraging sales, but I think not as much as their current practice of leaving users in the dark.

In Library module, choose Grid View. Select the pictures (so, select_all if you want to purge the whole history). Switch to Develop module. Now, under the Develop menu, you will find the option "clear history".

The key is the use of the Develop menu. Selecting multiple images in Grid, then switching still only deletes the one history (most selected) IF you use the History panel itself. Which kind of makes sense.

I'm not sure why I'd do this. One of the super cool features of LR is the unlimited history (unlike Photoshop which loses it all after you quit).

Interesting - good find, I'm not sure when they snuck that in - but it has zero effect. I really don't know what the point of it is, or what it actually does. One thing is clear, it's not hitting the database much at all.

I copied my 1.31GB catalog, cleared all my history, confirmed everything was removed from the history panel on various shots. ZERO catalog filesize change. No point as far as performance doing it that way.

I then put my original copy back, since it doesn't do anything positive, I'll keep the option to have the data usable.

Interesting - good find, I'm not sure when they snuck that in - but it has zero effect. I really don't know what the point of it is, or what it actually does. One thing is clear, it's not hitting the database much at all.

I copied my 1.31GB catalog, cleared all my history, confirmed everything was removed from the history panel on various shots. ZERO catalog filesize change. No point as far as performance doing it that way.

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You need to optimize your "zero-history" catalog before seeing a file size change.